• Don’t become discouraged if you volunteer for a clinical trial but are turned down.

“Once we contact a potential volunteer, we need to see if the person is eligible,” said Dr. Howard Taras from UC San Diego’s Clinical & Translational Research Institute. “They go through the process, but they’re in the wrong age group or for some reason they aren’t eligible for the trial. We want them to try again.”

Clinical trial lingo

Clinical study or trial: An investigation using human subjects to discover how beneficial or effective an intervention (drug, therapy or behavioral change) may be.

Arms: The assigned groups of participants in a particular clinical study.

Community health workers: Public health workers who have an understanding of the community they serve. Some are specifically trained to be clinical study recruiters.

Control group: The arm of a trial that gets the standard treatment, no treatment or a placebo.

Double blind: In this type of trial, neither the subjects nor investigators know which participants have been given which interventions.

Eligibility criteria: The standards that qualify willing participants for a particular clinical study. Age is a common criterion.

Experimental group: In a randomized trial, the arm that receives the new or experimental treatment.

Good clinical practice: An international ethical and scientific quality standard for clinical studies, protecting subjects’ rights and confidentiality.

Healthy volunteers: People without disorders or diseases needed to participate in many studies, often offering comparison to those with the condition.

Human subject: The individual, healthy or not, participating in a clinical trial.

Informed consent form: After reviewing the relevant information provided in the consent form, the subject signs it in order to participate in the study.

Institutional review board: An independent group of professionals that reviews and approves clinical trials, ensuring ethical standards and appropriate informed consent documents. All reputable clinical trials have been approved by an IRB.

Investigator: A physician, nurse, pharmacist or other health care professional who administers or dispenses a clinical trial’s treatment. The principal investigator is responsible for the overall conduct of the study.

Multicenter: A trial being conducted at several sites at once.

Open-label: In this type of study, all parties (patient, physician and study coordinator) are informed of who are receiving which treatments.

Paid trial: One of the small number of clinical trials that pay participants for their time.

Phases: The steps in clinical trials, going from Phase 1 with a small group of people being tested, to increasingly larger groups in Phase 2 and 3. In Phase 4, also called a post-marketing surveillance study, information is collected to determine other markets for a drug or to continue checking on its efficacy and any side effects.

Placebo: A substance without active ingredients that resembles the actual drug being investigated. Often the control group is unknowingly taking a placebo.